A massive 28 seconds followed until the next car crossed the line, and there was little wrong with
Giancarlo Fisichella's
Renault for the Italian was again being urged to up his pace by those on the pit-wall. Fisichella had managed to keep Kubica in sight early on, but the R27 simply did not have the speed to trouble the BMWs and was left to its own devices for much of the afternoon.
In the closing stages, however, Fisi began to fall into the clutches of the recovering Massa, who had come from the very back of the grid after taking a ten-place engine change penalty overnight to run sixth. The Brazilian had initially found himself embroiled in a train being held up by the ailing
Honda of
Jenson Button but, once clear of the obstruction, quickly made ground on those further up the road. Despite opting to one stop in an attempt to gain as many points as possible - and suffer from having to run half the race on the softer rubber - Massa was right with Fisichella in the final few laps, but could not quite overhaul the Renault driver, missing out by 0.3secs at the line.
Although there were plenty of pretenders to the final points positions -
Jarno Trulli,
Takuma Sato,
Mark Webber and
Heikki Kovalainen among them - they were eventually filled by
Nico Rosberg and
Ralf Schumacher.
Overlooked for much of the event, Rosberg rose from twelfth on the grid to run on the fringes of the top ten before taking advantage of misfortunes ahead of him to edge closer to the points. The German was not letting the race simply come to him, however, and, finding the Toyota-powered Williams to his liking, also put a gutsy move on the similarly-engined 'works' car of Schumacher to take seventh on lap 37. The move was good enough to secure two points -
Williams' first for 13 races - as few positions changed hands in the second half of the race, although Rosberg was the first of the lapped runners at the flag.
